We've got your back. With the Tough-O-Meter, you'll know whether to bring extra layers or Swiss army knives as you summit the literary mountain. (10 = Toughest)
(5) Tree Line
As Victorian novels go, The Mayor of Casterbridge is pretty readable. It's "only" 320 pages in our edition. (That may sound like a lot, but take a look at Middlemarch by George Eliot or Bleak House by Charles Dickens. They're over 800 pages!) That said, there are still a lot of difficult and complex ideas in this novel, and because it was written over a hundred years ago, some of the vocabulary might be difficult for modern readers.